Entries from April 2011 ↓

Finally making some good progress on Transmageddon again. The new version is a quite big rewrite, switching to the new discoverer in plugins-base and using the new encodebin element. The UI has also been heavily modified and no longer uses the radio buttons, but instead relies on dynamic drop down lists.

Feature wise I am still at the same point as the previous version, partly because my developed goal was to port to the new UI and backend before adding features. Do plan on adding deinterlacing in there though, before making a new release (and do a lot o testing, I am sure there are a ton of regressions and behaviour issues atm).

Mandatory screen shot below, hope people like the new UI. I expect I will be able to close the vast majority of open Transmageddon bugs with this release, but of course the switch to encodebin has revealed some new bugs too :)

One project we have been working on for some time at Collabora Multimedia is making it easy to use GStreamer with Android. There has been some code available to do this for some time, but it was incomplete and not easy to use. Thanks to a project we did with ST Ericsson we got that code much improved and ST Ericsson kindly released that code afterwards. We then took that code and updated it to run with latest Gingerbread release of Android and also generalized it to make it easy to run with any chipset.

We have also now imported this code into the main GStreamer repositories, so that when you visit the GStreamer Git repository you find the code there along with all the other GStreamer modules. And we have also set up a GStreamer-android mailing list alongside the other GStreamer lists.

I recommend anyone interested to try it out to join the mailing list and engage with us on moving this code forward. Hopefully we can use it to enable a lot of cool Android devices coming out in the future using advanced GStreamer features such as video editing, Rygel DLNA support, Telepathy video conferencing and collaboration support, DVB support and more.

So a big thank you to Alessandro Decina, Reynaldo Verdejo, Thibault Saunier and Derek Foreman for the great effort they put into this and getting the code ready for release.

I guess a lot of you have seen the story about how Microsoft, EMC, Oracle and Apple are buying a bunch of Novell patents. The main worry from a lot of people seems to be that these patents ends up being used against open source, which is a risk, but it seems the latest changes to the deal makes the patents mostly defensive. That said, the problem still persists as it means there is another seat of patents no longer keeping these companies in check. The problems with software patents are well known, like their low quality and the crazy cost of fighting patents in court. The reason they haven’t killed the software industry completely is because of the patent nuclear deterrent, meaning how at least in the case of big companies they have enough patents themselves to usually scare of any patent lawsuits from the competitors. However this is a unstable situation and I can’t say that I like seeing this pool of patents no longer being available to deter patent suits from the 4 companies in question.